dabockster

Everything is still up to whoever is running the platform. I'm just saying that, from an web admin perspective, that $2/month works. And if it doesn't, you have their billing info to track trolls down irl if necessary.

> Admins knowing peoples' identities simply moves the weakest link in the chain to the admins.

And now you have a better chance at pointing a finger at someone, at the very least. And the thought of that finger pointing would be enough to keep an admin on top of things.

> The only reason I haven't is because it feels like LinkedIn may have already jumped the shark and I wouldn't really get the value for my money.

You'd get the lulz. That in itself can be mentally satisfying.

Tbh I've thought about trolling LinkedIn myself. It honestly needs to die.

> The internet was not meant to be taken seriously.

Coming from all the pro-Internet and open web talk of the 2010s still rattling around in my brain, this felt like dunking my head in an ice bath. Painful but necessary.

The EU took sideloading mainstream. It's only a matter of time before that becomes the norm.

You also need to consider the fact that Epic Games is big enough that they could have just used an exploit to sideload Fortnite back on the iPhone, and the lawsuit was basically PR to draw attention to the App Store's ambiguities. That in itself shows App Stores are slowly on their way out.

> Who distorted that simple idea into the garbage websites we have now?

Corporate America. Where clean code goes to die.

> If I now go one step further and use an LLM to summarize content because the authentic presentation is so riddled with ads, JavaScript, and pop-ups, that the content becomes borderline unusable, then why would the LLM accessing the website on my behalf be in a different legal category as my Firefox web browser accessing the website on my behalf?

Because the LLM is usually on a 3rd party cloud system and ultimately not under your full control. You have no idea if the LLM is retaining any of that information for that business's own purposes beyond what a EULA says - which basically amounts to a pinky swear here. Especially if that LLM is located across international borders.

Now, for something like Ollama or LMStudio where the LLM and the whole toolchain is physically on your own system? Yeah that should be like Firefox legally since it's under your control.

> We're moving progressively in the direction of "pages can't be served for free anymore". Which, I don't think is a problem, and in fact I think it's something we should have addressed a long time ago.

I agree, but your idea below that is overly complicated. You can't micro-transact the whole internet.

That idea feels like those episodes of Star Trek DS9 that take place on Feregenar - where you have to pay admission and sign liability wavers to even walk on the sidewalk outside. It's not a true solution.

> Thankfully I'm old so my accounts were made before normies flooded the net and started trusting everything.

It wasn't "normies" so much as it was the leadership and early investors of Facebook shoving "just trust us" and FOMO literally everywhere online. The hype (and hope) in 2010 was REAL and almost all privacy related conversations were shut down on sight. Heck, I think I still have my copy of Jeff Jarvis's Public Parts (ISBN13 9781451636352) somewhere in my closet. Amazing read if you really want to understand the mindset in place at the time.

> The internet went from 'YouTube asking users to never use your real name' to 'you have to submit your ID to some random app' in 10 years. Crazy!

Because we couldn't get anyone to take the internet seriously if it was just a bunch of anonymous pseudonyms trolling each other. And maybe that was a mistake.

The world is moving away from App Stores and walled gardens. Figure out other options.

The fact that it verifies by ID scan is also not safe at all for a million different reasons.

A better way would have been to charge a small subscription fee - like $2/month or something. The fee filters out 99% of the trolls out there (who wants to pay to troll) and also gives the app/website admins access to billing info - name, mailing address, phone number, etc - without the need for a full ID scan. So the tiny amount of trolls that do pay to troll would have to enter accurate deanonymizing payment information to even get on the system in the first place.

And it can be made so only admins know peoples' true identities. For the user facing parts, pseudonyms and usernames are still very possible - again so long as everyone understands up front that such a platform would ultimately not be anonymous on the back end.

But oh no, that won't hypergrow the company and dominate the internet! Think of all the people in India and China you're missing out on! /sarcasm

> Appropriate regulation should make this an offense punishable by a large fine.

And some kind of legal penalty for the engineers as well. Just fining the company does nothing to change the behavior of the people who built it in the first place.

> Then, why isn't there an explosion in such PRs on a large amount of open source projects?

People don't like working for free, either by themselves or with an AI agent.

Probably a large part of it, honestly. I was just talking with someone the other day about how the whole cloud economy for the past 15 years may have been grossly exaggerated by very loud VC backed companies flooding the internet with blog posts like this one. The big behemoths - hospitals, governments, law offices, manufacturers - those people tend to run a lot of local tech for various reasons. And they’re also the most quiet when it comes to the internet.

> but I'm not letting them touch my code until I can run it 100% locally offline

You can do this already with Ollama, RooCode, and a Docker compatible container engine.

Especially with MCP programs that can run in Docker containers.

You can get 90%+ of the way there with a tiny “coder” LLM running on the Ollama backend with an extension like RooCode and a ton of MCP tools.

In fact, MCP is so ground breaking that I consider it to be the actual meat and potatoes of coding AIs. Large models are too monolithic, and knowledge is forever changing. Better just to use a small 14b model (or even 8b in some cases!) with some MCP search tools, a good knowledge graph for memory, and a decent front end for everything. Let it teach itself based on the current context.

And all of that can run on an off the shelf $1k gaming computer from Costco. It’ll be super slow compared to a cloud system (like HDD vs SSD levels of slowness), but it will run in the first place and you’ll get *something* out of it.

It is, but you still have the hybrid/micro kernel offering a surprising amount of protection by separating and compartmentalizing everything more.

Hahaha I wrote that literally 1/2 a decade ago now! I was referring to stuff like Dribbble, Deviantart, and others before they required account signups everywhere.

Devs aren’t usually the best UX people and end up making great code but with menus and radio buttons everywhere, and UX people aren’t necessarily devs. And, at the time, I noticed there was a disconnect. So I figured I’d encourage people more to meet in the middle.

But, again, that was only a few months before the Covid lockdowns. I think the advice still rings true, but with all the tech layoffs happening I think our field is becoming really lost overall lately. We seem to have based way too much of our self identities on our day jobs, and obviously lost those identities when people got laid off or fired.

(And I should really update that bio for 2025 now that I’m back more regularly.)

I give it two weeks before it’s either rug pulled or hacked.

The Windows Hypervisor does suck in terms of an actual virtualization features, but it does reduce security significantly by disabling it. It’s a big front line defense against memory attacks.

CAD, GIS, and other stuff you see in civil engineering

I review my vibe code, even if it’s just skimming it for linter errors. But yeah, the meme is that people are apparently force pushing what ever gets spat out by an LLM without checking it.

Copyleft still removes the most common and available means for small inventors or businesses to get back *something* for their work.

In my experience, most law firms won’t go near big tech because of their litigious nature. Just the sheer amount of time and filings by big tech, legal or not, is enough to totally overwhelm an inexperienced legal team. It’s like a denial of service attack but through the court system.

The firms that will fight them are few and far between, and are priced accordingly.

Stallman has honestly done a ton of harm to our field. His “business model” reeks of ivory tower privilege and has ripped a ton of wealth and, more importantly, self-confidence, out of developers worldwide for at least 15-20 years now.

We all need to wake up to this.

That’s awesome that you were able to make it work. But not everyone has the ability, either logistically or financially (or both), to enforce copyrights on open source code. So we should assume there will be some big bad actors who will absolutely take advantage of that.

It’s nice, but it’s also one of those infamous one person OSS projects. Don’t use it in an IT environment if you can help it.

And if you can donate money to this person at all, do it.

The thing about Chocolatey is that, iirc, it’s still largely community members maintaining that registry. Not the best in a cybersecurity context, and some firms may have licensing against unauthorized distribution of their installer files like that.

Hence WinGet, a Microsoft owned and operated alternative that those firms may feel less jittery about.